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Which departments match my interest?


fakeo

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I'm applying this year and would like to mostly finalize my list of schools to apply to. I've been on the website of basically every department that received an actual rank on US News. Unfortunately, quite a few departments are very vague about their strengths, they just simply say students can specialize in micro theory, macro, international/trade, development, econometrics, and labor. Which basically covers anything. So anyways, my question is what departments all over the ranking spectrum (as I'm trying to cast a wide net) match my interests? I'm just trying to see if I missed any close matches.

 

My interests are development/growth, evolutionary, behavioral, economics of education, and computational economics.

 

Which departments have all or a subset of these fields as their strengths? Of course I know the top 10 is good at everything, I'm mainly thinking of departments ranked between 10 and say 80. Hopefully my question is not too vague to answer.

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1. Do you have a preference ordering over your interests?

2. Since you've already been to the websites of most schools, you can find out how many professors they have working on these areas, make an approximate judgement on how strong the schools are in each area (e.g. if there are 4 professors doing development/growth but only 1 of them has it as a major interest, that's not the same as having 4 hard-core development professors), and put all of this into a spreadsheet. This should make it easier for you to choose among departments (I found it very useful to do this though it was also really time-consuming).

Faculty research interests are in general a more reliable guide than what departments put on their website as the fields students can specialize in, since no department wants to discourage students from a particular field from applying (the exception may be U Arizona which was very specific about the fields it wanted students to select from).

3. Another way is to use the forum/google/rankings lists to find top schools in each of the areas you are interested in, and then find those that are strong in all of the areas (however this information can sometimes be lagged by a few years)..

4. Yet another way is to work backwards from the papers you have (presumably) read and liked in the areas you listed, and find out which universities the authors are based in.

5. Finally, you can hope that someone better-informed than I am gives you a direct answer to your question!

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Thanks a lot for your reply NBZ.

 

Indeed I already have a spreadsheet but I didn't check out the research interests of every single professor to make it. I tried to see if the schools mention their strengths, or what specializations/field courses they offer (mostly for more lower ranked depts); and rated them on how happy I would be there based on this. Problem with checking faculty research interests is that in some cases they're vague (i.e. they say "labor" which can mean a myriad of different subfields, or the even better "applied econometrics"), outdated (many profs have interests they don't really work on). Also in many cases, they don't list faculty research interests on the faculty listing page, but you gotta click on each and every prof individually. Meh. I guess I still gotta do it.

 

Of course, I've tried #3 and #4 already. I think I have a list that is mostly complete, I was just interested in whether I missed some very good match.

 

Anyways, thanks for the help. I'll check out prof research interests if I don't have anything better to do. ;)

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I agree it's a dreary process finding out faculty research interests, and the way these websites are designed rarely help matters! The one upside is that as you are checking faculty profiles, you can hopefully also find some interesting papers/abstracts to read along the way.
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Try to take a look at the papers rather than what people state as research interests. Also keep in mind that some people (think tenured professors) are quite happy with where they are so they dont really feel like updating their page is a priority. Try looking at people's papers, especially the more recent ones. This should give you a pretty good idea of what type of topics they will be happy to advise you on.
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Try to take a look at the papers rather than what people state as research interests. Also keep in mind that some people (think tenured professors) are quite happy with where they are so they dont really feel like updating their page is a priority. Try looking at people's papers, especially the more recent ones. This should give you a pretty good idea of what type of topics they will be happy to advise you on.

 

Thanks, I will try to do this too. Even though this is an even more tedious process. ;) Maybe I will check out the recent titles in each department's working paper series? This might be faster than going through each prof individually. It's funny that most (though certainly not all) of the papers I read and like are actually from quite low ranked depts I would prefer not to go to. Maybe I should step my game up.

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